ohh... it's been a tough few days!

the nights have been, anyway. lots of waking, lots of the kind of boobing where he won't let go of my nipple for one minute all night, without reprieve. i feel exhausted again just remembering this.
all that grabbing, hungry voracious trapping arms and jaws holding me in position all night... where the inch at the end of my nipple is the inch distance between me and being able to fall backwards into decent sleep.

and last night, there was a complete wakeup. a bounce upright, perky eyed and voiced in the pitch dark, announcing readiness for games and playing. almost sweet... if i weren't in the middle of the deepest sleep.
we were up for 2 hours, and then i was up for a half hour after he finally fell asleep.

and then this evening, i made the mistake of breaking our routine.
instead of dinner-playground- wind down inside, i did: playground, dinner, play at grandma's, drive home to sleep.
big mistake....: he was all amped up playing at grandma's, no amount of gentle coercing or offering of choices or anything in the GD book would get him to willingly leave... in the end we had to carry out an unwilling child, who clamored and cried for boobing all the way home (the longest 4 minutes of my life), and then when we got home, begged and pleaded to go to the playground, even though it was already dusk and mosquitoes were out.
we ended up with him sobbing in my arms in bed: him flinging himself heartbrokenly into my arms and throwing his little arms tightly around me, while he sobbed...

i patted and crooned a while, then we sat in front of tv and watched shorts of a penguin doco, during which he fell asleep on my lap. where, other than a long boobing interruption, he's remained since...

i don't know which feels more unbearable to me, actually going through all of this, or the loud litany of painful doubt.
why is he like this? is this because of how i've parented him? has my parenting been too child-centred / lacking in boundaries / inconsistent?

and then all the thoughts about night-weaning....
i no longer know anyone personally who's still night feeding a toddler...

i don't know if there's any more good reason to not night wean, other than he's intensely resistant to the suggestion and seems intensely dependent on it, and i think it would be forceful and traumatic to undergo night weaning now.

and i wonder whether i've completely screwed him up; is it right that he's completely dependent on boobing to fall and refall asleep all through the night, at 2 years old?
i do feel like i've completely screwed up, or missed some very important boat..

i feel as i did when i was in primary school, when i completely missed doing a test that every single one of the students sitting around me did from start to finish, because i was talking and in my own world.
or in high school, where i found myself suddenly alone standing in the square, as every other student in school had gone to an assembly that i alone had no idea about.

okay, so my logical or wiser subset tells me:
i was clingy and fussy, andrew was clingy and fussy; dandan is clingy and fussy and would be probably more so if he wasn't APed. this is probably the best version of him at this age that he could have been....
and that with his sleep; he needs this slow start up, he needs this hand-holding, to gradually find his own sleep-legs in his own readiness.
besides, that his bad sleep has only happened in occasional periods over the last year, and often coinciding with spurts of height or braininess; that largely he's been sleeping well (20 minutes of falling-asleep, 4-6 hours of non-waking, 10-12 hour nights).
and that, my god, he's 2.... this is just what it's like. especially when you mess up their end of day routine...

i feel a weariness inside my spirit, amped up by tiredness. i could sleep to fill the latter, but to fill the former, i'm going to stay up some more and read and think.